IBM Watson has been busy in fields including healthcare, medicine, and genetics. Now, Watson is taking to the classroom in the form of an artificial teaching assistant named Jill Watson, who has begun working at Georgia Tech helping students taking an online course.

In The Wall Street Journal, Melissa Korn writes, “Ms. Watson…wrote things like ‘Yep!’ and ‘we’d love to,’ speaking on behalf of her fellow TAs, in the online forum where students discussed coursework and submitted projects.”

Korn quotes student Jennifer Gavin as saying, “It seemed very much like a normal conversation with a human being.” And student Shreyas Vidyarthi imagined Jill as a friendly Caucasian 20-something Ph.D. candidate.

The students learned of her true nature just as one was prepared to nominate her for an outstanding TA award.

Ashok Goel, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, told Korn that online learning can reach a gigantic global audience, but the many students ask a lot of questions, burdening human TAs. He noted that students in his Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence class post 10,000 questions per semester.

Georgia Tech researchers trained Ms. Watson using a database of 40,000 discussion forum postings. Ms. Watson answers questions only if she has 97% confidence the answers would be correct.

There is some concern about substituting artificial TAs for real ones. Korn quotes Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, as saying, “We should have full disclosure: Am I talking to a machine or to a person?”

But student Tyson Bailey commented, “We’re taking an artificial intelligence class. There should be some artificial intelligence here.”